Since 2022, we have run the Finura Tech Health Benchmarking survey, and every year we ask advice firms whether they use a client portal to engage their customers.
Every year, more firms tell us they want one. Every year, the number who actually have one working sits roughly where it was the year before. In our most recent cut: 38% yes, 38% no, and 25% "no, but we intend to."
That 25% is where good intentions go to die. It's been about a quarter of the market for four years running.
Meanwhile, 70% of advice documents still go to clients as an email attachment.
85% of us have MFA switched on. 85% of us run cyber training for our staff. And then we take the most sensitive document we will ever produce and fire it off to a Gmail account.
Clients aren’t begging for a portal.
Your clients don't want a portal. They've never once woken up wanting one. They don't care what CRM you run or which product you bought. As one adviser put it to me recently: the last thing my clients want is another password to remember.
So when a firm buys a portal, sends a launch email with an activation link, and gets 12% take-up, the reaction is almost always "we picked the wrong product." Then they spend another eighteen months looking for the one clients will love. They won't love that one either.
The firms that have actually moved the needle did three unglamorous things.
Twelve months, one project.
Adoption isn't a launch. It's a program, and it takes about 12-18 months to become business as usual.
One firm I've watched do this properly put an adviser in charge who'd worked in both advice and paraplanning, someone who understood the client conversation and the back office. A champion with the job in their name, and a CEO who held people to it in every management meeting for twelve months.
Put in your team's balanced scorecards. Percentage of ongoing fee clients activated. Percentage of advice documents delivered through the portal rather than email. Digital signatures captured.
Some portals that offer digital signatures can save you a fortune on this feature alone.
If it isn't measured monthly, it's a launch. Launches fade by week six.
These are precisely the same things that software companies use to track user adoption.
Reception owns the download.
The single most effective adoption tactic I've seen involves no technology strategy whatsoever.
We know many clients still attend your office for their review. Before they go through to the adviser, the person on reception asks whether they've got the app yet. If not: "Let's do it now”. It’s a great opportunity to build rapport and talk to your clients about online safety.
That's the whole play. Because nobody activates a financial services portal at 9 pm on a Tuesday after finding your email in the promotions tab. But clients are very happy to ask your client concierge to help them use their phone. They ask their kids (and grandkids) all the time.
Final tip is to hold functionality back deliberately: documents and signatures first, then expand from there. A dozen features on a 74-year-old in week one is how you teach them the portal is hard.
The waiver
Then there's the group who say no. Some firms have started handling that differently, and I think it's the most interesting development in this whole area.
At review time, the client who declines the portal is asked to sign something. Not a punishment but an acknowledgment. It records that the firm offered a secure way to exchange sensitive documents, explained the risks of email, and the client chose email anyway.
This is not a new concept. Advisers and accountants often had clients who declined insurance cover sign a red form confirming they'd been offered it and said no.
Run the wording past your licensee or RM first. But do have the conversation. It reframes the portal from "our new app" to "how we protect you” and a surprising number of clients change their mind at exactly that moment.
It starts from the top.
Portal adoption is the purest example in our industry of the gap between what firms say and what firms do.
It's not a software selection problem. It's a twelve-month accountability problem. Do you and your firm have the grit to see it through?
@Peter.Worn, Joint Managing Director, Finura Group
